Lend Lease scraps data centre renewal plans, goes IaaS instead

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International property development company Lend Lease has announced it is to replace an ageing data centre in Harrow with a £1.5 million infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) deal with IT systems integration firm Logicalis.

The decision will allow Australia-based Lend Lease not only to dodge a data centre renewal project in Harrow, but also shift day-to-day IT management tasks to Logicalis, so that its own IT staff can focus on innovation, according to Chris Lemon, the firm’s regional infrastructure manager for EMEA.

“We wanted to focus on innovation in the business, rather than just keeping the lights on. We knew we didn’t want to build from scratch; the business case just didn’t stack up, so we chose to explore an infrastructure-as-a-service model,” he said. What Lend Lease was looking for from the deal, he added, was the ability to retain in-house the resources it needs to “make our speed of delivery right and stay agile”, with a partner providing the rest.

Among the Land Lease’s current UK projects are the One the Elephant and Trafalgar Place developments at Elephant & Castle in south London. It was also behind the Athletes’ Village at the London 2012 Olympics.

Logicalis worked with the Lend Lease team to design and migrate Lend Lease’s infrastructure into Logicalis’ Optimal Managed Service model. This included the re-platforming of legacy applications, implementation of a cloud model, co-location and a range of managed services.

“Logicalis created a robust, low-risk transition and service transfer plan and the migration was completed with minimal business disruption,” said Lemon. Plus, he added, the value of the contract (£1.5 million) is less than half of what it would have cost Lend Lease to build a new data centre, and is expected to deliver further savings on IT resource, management and energy bills.